Subaltern housing policies:Accommodating migrant workers in wealthy Geneva

In the wealthy and orderly city of Geneva, Switzerland, accommodation centres built in haste between the 1950s and the 1980s to house seasonal guestworkers from southern Europe are still standing and still inhabited. Today’s residents are precarious workers, undocumented or with temporary permits as well as asylum seekers. While the seasonal status disappeared in the early 2000s, the demand for low-skilled, flexible labour did not. Analysing the historical trajectories of specific buildings helps us to answer the question of who replaced the seasonal workers, not only in the labour and the housing markets, but also in the symbolic spectrum of legitimacy. This article introduces the notion of ‘Subaltern Housing Policies’ to account for the public action that leads to the production and subsequent use of forms of housing characterised by standards of comfort and security far below those of the rental and social housing stock, but considered ‘good enough’ for their occupants. We argue that ‘subaltern’ relates not only to housing conditions, but also to the policies themselves, and last but not least to the people who are subjected to them. This notion allows us to trace a link between the production of substandard forms of housing and the production of categories of people who are kept on the margins of full citizenship.</p

Towards a radical housing responsibility

Responsibility—as an analytic or topic of political debate—is out of vogue in critical housing studies. Rather than offering progressive potential, the call for responsibility has been seen to foster neoliberal governance, racial structural violence, and forms of dependency. Conversely, this paper posits that a critical engagement with notions of responsibility can provide a domain for critique, everyday engagement, and legal political struggle against housing injustice when the concept’s foundational premises are radically revised. To develop this radical notion of housing responsibility, we combine a multipronged theoretical approach with a discussion of housing struggles in different empirical domains. Our theoretical intervention is based on a critique of how liberal notions of responsibility that forefront liabilities for past damages dominate moral claims around housing (e.g., who ought to provide, care for, and profit from housing). As these liberal understandings of responsibility organize the intersection of legal, spatial, and material interventions in housing, they hinder a more encompassing assumption of responsibility. Drawing from feminist, legal, sociological, and philosophical scholarship, this paper develops an alternative and propositional account of a radical housing responsibility. Rather than from notions of individualized subjectivity, this notion of responsibility derives relational commitments from our co-being in one common world. To explore how such a notion of responsibility can play out in contemporary housing struggles and guide a decolonial, feminist, radical political practice, we join up three empirical domains focused on housing struggles in Berlin (Germany), Athens (Greece), and Geneva (Switzerland). In conclusion, we bring these theoretical and empirical domains together into a discussion of how a radical housing responsibility can be used to cause effective political change

Insecurity and Segregation: Rejecting an Urbanism of Fear

Security discourses taking place in contemporary cities – in both developing and developed countries – feed defiance and legitimize an “urbanism of fear” based on controls that increase social and spatial segregation. Inversely, a sustainable city is an inclusive one capable of making a place for all kinds of people in a shared world. This is a plea for ambitious urban planning policies

Between Hospitality and Inhospitality: The Janus-Faced 'Arrival Infrastructure'

Although ‘arrival infrastructure’ is central to the experience of migrants arriving in a new city, is it sufficient to form a ‘hospitable milieu’? Our article compares newcomers’ experiences with ‘arrival infrastructure’ in two European cities: Brussels and Geneva. Based on ethnographic research with 49 migrants who arrived a few months earlier, we show that arrival infrastructure is Janus-faced. On one hand, it welcomes newcomers and contributes to making the city hospitable. On the other hand, it rejects, deceives and disappoints them, forcing them to remain mobile—to go back home, go further afield, or just move around the city—in order to satisfy their needs and compose what we will call a ‘hospitable milieu.’ The arrival infrastructure’s inhospitality is fourfold: linked firstly to its limitations and shortcomings, secondly to the trials or tests newcomers have to overcome in order to benefit from the infrastructure, thirdly to the necessary forms of closure needed to protect those who have just arrived and fourthly to those organising and managing the infrastructure, with divergent conceptions of hospitality. By using the notion of milieu and by embedding infrastructure into the broader question of hospitality, we open up an empirical exploration of its ambiguous role in the uncertain trajectories of newcomers

Rhythmanalysis of Urban Events: Empirical Elements from the Montreux Jazz Festival

This article proposes an original approach to urban events mapping. At the theoretical level, the article is based on rhythmanalysis and recent research on urban rhythms. It contrasts with previous research by departing from everyday rhythms to tackle the specific rhythms of urban events. Drawing on this theoretical framework, the article proposes to analyse the rhythms of the Montreux Jazz Festival. The article proposes two main types of rhythmic scales, linked with the historical development of the Festival and its annual performance. The methodology is based on a mixed method of data collection and an original analysis framework. The analysis of the historical rhythm is carried out based on the analysis of the festival archives and interviews with experts. The analysis uses the Time Machine visualisation device that reveals three processes of urban resonance: the spread, which shows how the festival is integrated into the existing urban fabric; the openness, which shows accessibility; and the grip, which seeks to evaluate the urban sphere of influence of the event. These different visualisations are enriched by the addition of other data, including ticket scanning and commercial transactions that show the alternance between high and low-intensity periods. These allowed us to not only confirm the impact of programming on flows, but also the effects of the wider organisation of the leisure system. The results of the analysis show that the intertwining of the two rhythmic scales produces a hyper-place that resonates both internationally and locally